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Comment by Mediterraneo10 | Hacker News Reader

> However Open Access is not panacea. Most of the times it just moves the cost from the subscriber to the author.

I feel lucky to work in a field where journals are OA, but authors do not have to pay to publish. Our major journals are published by learned societies that were founded with endowments large enough to cover publication costs in perpetuity. In fact, that’s how a lot of journals used to be published before big publishers, like Elsevier and Springer, convinced those societies to entrust them with the journals, claiming it would make things easier for everyone.

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>>but authors do not have to pay to publish

My company has to pay to publish in our preferred journal of open access (PeerJ). I gladly pay for lifetime memberships for all of our authors, which is pittance and affords lifetime publication rights with no additional fees.

But we do pay. Most OA journals do have fee waivers and are very liberal with them, though.

PeerJ is different, though, in that you pay through lifetime memberships rather than a new fee every time you want to publish an article. Their fees are also substantially lower than those of the traditional publishers.

No question. I support PeerJ to the fullest extent and the price is more than fair. (It's actually unfair, honestly, it's far too low.)

But there is a fee. And it's important for supporters to be honest so it doesn't appear one-sided, so, here I am.

Out of curiosity, what's the field? In physics nothing is particularly open-access but that doesn't matter because everything with any significance at all gets put up on arxiv six months before publication.

Don't know about OP. In my experience a lot/most Computational Biology papers are Open Access.

I can second this. I've had a much better experience in Computational Biology compared to other fields wrt paper access.

For its conferences, ACM SIGPLAN asks the authors to pay for the open-access fee if possible, but will cover it if the author cannot afford it.

Well, it does matter somewhat: authors still publish in journals at the traditional publishers, and universities still subscribe to it, wasting research funds in developed countries and making the barriers to participation higher for researchers in emerging economies.

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